Jamie Chimpanzee, AKA The Boss
Age:41
Favorite foods: Grapes and leeks
BFF: Foxie
Special talents: Persuading her human subjects to do her every bidding, using tools like a pro!
Favorite place to nap: In a huge complicated nest on the ground so she can keep an eye on everyone.
Favorite activities: Walking around Young’s Hill with friends, working on special projects made just for her, trying to undo any home improvements her caregivers have worked on in her enclosure.
Favorite food puzzle: Anything that is a good challenge for her to solve (and hoard).
Archives for April 2019
Possibility
The Cle Elum Seven seem to value Young’s Hill, their two-acre outdoor habitat, as much for the potential it offers as they do for the space it offers. They certainly make use of the space in a variety of ways:
But they also seem to enjoy pausing in the doorway leading out and considering the possibilities.
Fortress of solitude
We’ve been so busy in the chimp house today! Staff and some amazing volunteers raked out all the wood chips and straw in the greenhouse and replaced it with fresh shiny wood chips and straw! 🙂 What didn’t happen, was capturing any good photos. However, a few days ago I captured some photos of Jamie in one of her secret fort building modes and while they aren’t great quality, I do think they’re endearing. She’s always surprising us with her architectural feats and her desire to occasionally build “secret hideout” forts which are incredibly creative and amusing. Maybe she’s been feeling inspired by her Dwell magazines.
And once again we indulged her need to go incognito and pretended we couldn’t find her. I mean, we all need to hide out now and again. “Jamie?? Jamie? Where are you?”
All Play and No Work
The blanket ghost, mystery chimp, or the blanket bandit strikes again today! Missy, who we staff and volunteers thought for a slight moment was Negra, was caught playing an intense game of under the blanket wrestling, biting, and canoodling. What I cannot get over is the moment at the end of the video. Annie’s head in Missy’s lap. Little Miss was looking out the window while her best friend Annie rested her head. I mean my heart hurts just writing it! Let’s just say there were a lot of happy chimps today!
Connections: Honoring James Douglas
The truth about running a nonprofit animal sanctuary is that most of your time is spent interacting with humans.
I get that this might not sound all that appealing to everyone who is interested in embarking on a career in the sanctuary or animal protection field. Let’s face it, a lot of “animal people” feel strong connections to non-human animals, while feeling some disdain, awkwardness, or unease around their own human species.
Something I learned early on that seems to get reinforced more strongly each day, however, is that people who are drawn to help sanctuaries are some of the very best examples of the human species.
In eleven years, you can imagine that we’ve met a whole lot of (human) people in the form of volunteers, donors, staff members, students, and other supporters. We get to know people and we become aware of both the joys and the hardships that people face in their lives. I often find myself thinking and worrying about humans that are connected to the sanctuary far more than the chimpanzees.
Through our Sponsor-a-Day and Personalized Stones donation programs, we’ve also been introduced to the important human and non-human people in the lives of supporters, often after these influential people have already passed away.
It’s an incredible honor to be able to honor people.
When someone very close to the sanctuary passes away, though, I feel at a loss as to how to appropriately honor them.
Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, and the world, recently lost an incredible man. Introduced to the sanctuary by his wife and CSNW volunteer, Jen, James Douglas was a long-serving board member who led CSNW through many transitions. He was full of optimism and positivity, even when faced with difficult situations. He was kind and generous. He was a natural leader. He was a friend and a mentor.
Although the sanctuary was a small part of his life, and he leaves behind many, many people who were changed by his life and affected by his loss, he played an outsized role in the relatively short life of the sanctuary. He meant a lot to us personally as well as to the development of the organization.
I plan to honor the legacy that he left behind at CSNW by working even harder to carry out the plans for the future that James helped to craft and to attempt to approach life and work with even just a small amount of the curiosity, joyfulness, and hope that he exemplified. The same qualities that I see in the chimpanzees.
Cheers to you, James.
A Show of Hands
I saw this illustration of primate hands shared on social media recently and thought it was a great example of how diverse the primate order is.
The most unusual hand belongs to the aye-aye (Daubetonia). It taps its long, slender fingers on trees in search of food. After opening up a hollow with its rodent-like incisors, it uses its specialized middle digit to extract grubs. Think of them as the primate version of a woodpecker.
Some primates, like the slow loris (Nycticebus) and potto (Perodicticus), have evolved hands that allow for better arboreal grasping. Notice how the index fingers have become mostly vestigial and the thumb has rotated away from the other digits. This is part of a suite of adaptations that allow them to maintain a strong grip for long periods of time. It’s probably not a coincidence that they look more like birds’ feet.
In another example of form following function, the long digits of tarsiers (Tarsius) have rounded, frog-like pads, allowing them to cling and leap like…yes, frogs!
Many arboreal species, like orangutans (Pongo), have evolved small thumbs while others, like the spider monkey (Ateles), lack an external thumb entirely to aid in climbing. While it’s tempting to think of opposable thumbs as somehow better or more advanced (even the spider monkey’s genus name sounds judgmental – Ateles, meaning incomplete or imperfect, is a reference to their missing thumbs), this is simply not true. The ancestor to the spider monkey had opposable thumbs but in the course of adapting to their environment, spider monkeys got those lousy things out of the way so that they could grip and swing better. They are perfectly complete for the niche they inhabit.
Looking at a chimpanzee’s hand, you can see that they are far less specialized than those of many other primates, making them generally well-suited to both climbing and walking. While chimpanzees walk on the soles of their feet, they flex their hands and bear weight on the outside of the intermediate phalanges (the part of the finger between the second and third knuckle).
Thick pads develop on this part of the hand for protection.
Long palms and fingers and short thumbs aid in gripping large trunks and branches.
The trade-off, when compared to human hands, is less power and control in the precision grip.
The length of a chimpanzee’s hand and more limited rotation and flexion of the thumb prevent pad-to-pad gripping or pinching, but they are still able to grasp and manipulate objects between the thumb and fingers, allowing for the use of tools.